"WASHINGTON, Apr. 1 /Governance Newswire/ — The organizations that create street names, assign addresses, and assign
telephone numbers have issued a joint announcement: Henceforth any conversation not conducted in Bahasa Malayu will result in
termination of the relevant address or telephone number assignment."

The above bit of fiction is not pure silliness. Fear of equivalent, Internet-related excesses is the essence of Milton Mueller's
book, Ruling the Root. The Syracuse University professor believes that administration of Internet addresses and domain names
provides a fulcrum for overall Internet governance. He says they create a "political economy" vulnerable to serious abuse. Domain
name administration is equated with control over Internet content, because, "a domain name record [is] very much like an Internet
driver's license" as if it provides permission to use the Net, and even authorizes the locations one may visit.

Organization
The book covers both IP address and domain name administration. The material on IP addresses is thin, perhaps because it is a
well-managed area without significant controversy. This is in marked contrast to the recent history of debate on Domain Name
System (DNS) oversight. So it might have been instructive to see a comparison between the two administrative models, beyond
simply noting that domain names can be interesting.

Discussion covers Internet technology, the history and politics of DNS and IP administrative management structure, and the
intellectual property aspects of name assignment conflicts. Mueller suggests a three-layer hierarchy: technical, economic, and
policy. What is missing from this "architecture" and from the entire book is any concern for the pragmatic details of
administration and operation of these global, mission-critical services. Yet such tasks are difficult to perform well, as Network
Solutions repeatedly demonstrated over the years, by losing registrations and corrupting critical data files; and the effects of
problems are large.

When Star Trek's Captain Picard commands, "make it so," we know that he fully appreciates the challenges in implementing his
directive. However, for Ruling the Root, policy development is not concerned with the operational
complexities.

Not surprisingly, the book often demonstrates a misunderstanding of constraints inherent in DNS technology, although the tutorial
on basic Internet technology is adequate, in spite of making the common error about the "T" in TCP/IP. [1]

Differing Opinions
Other reviewers of the book have called it well written, insightful, and nuanced. Indeed the discussion of history that is fully
documented and involves simple, clear, objective facts is quite good. The rest of the time Mueller presents biased and unfounded
descriptions of Internet governance, motives, and decisions, while failing to distinguish between what is fact and what is his
opinion.

Ruling the Root sees adversaries, conspiracies, and threats, and permits no balancing sense of diverse collaboration,
constructive criticism, or productive compromise. The technical community is somewhat less suspect, but is deprecated with the
usual cliche about its naivete. So Mueller misses the essential point that techies designed, built, operated, and grew this robust,
survivable, equitable system for global operations and service governance.

Professor Mueller's treatment of the dominant DNS registry, Network Solutions (NSI), now VeriSign, is curiously
superficial and soft. NSI benefited spectacularly from the National Science Foundation's decision to permit charging for domain
names, and from the policies and delays in the formation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), as well as ICANN's distraction away from its intended registry oversight function and toward abstract debates about
Internet governance. Yet the book does not consider NSI's role in ICANN-related political processes.

Mueller fails to understand the history of the organization that managed the DNS from its inception, the Internet Assigned
Numbers Authority (IANA) and Jon Postel's role in running it. IANA is incorrectly represented as a simple operations arm of
the U.S. Government. The grass-roots basis for its real legitimacy is missed. Its policy role is missed. Its collaborative
processes are denied. For example, Mueller tells us that the description of IANA in RFC 1083, published in 1988 meant, "a new world
was being defined by the RFC." In reality it was simply documenting established practice, as is typical for operations
RFCs.

Validation
Mueller's substantiation of his analyses is also problematic. The book must be read with careful attention to the actual authority
of each source. Goals and agendas are often misstated. For example, he characterizes the pre-ICANN International Forum for the
White Paper (IFWP) as "the real arena for arriving at a decision [about the details of the new organization]." Its actual goal
was simply to be a forum for discussion. Discussion, not decision-making. [2]

The book claims that the pre-ICANN International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC) was formed "to develop and implement a blueprint
for a global governance structure for the domain name system." In fact, the IAHC was formed for "specifying and implementing
policies and procedures relating to iTLDs (international top-level domains, now called 'generic' TLDs, or gTLDs)." [3] He claims,
"They had asserted that the root was theirs to dispose of." To the contrary, the IAHC was explicitly subordinate to IANA, and had
nothing at all to do with management of the DNS root or any non-gTLD part of the DNS. Interestingly, the endnote Mueller offers as
substantiation disproves his characterization.

Ruling the Root is loaded with endnotes—27 pages of small print. However, even the formal citations are problematic.
Note #55 cites a newspaper article as a primary source, as if it were definitive proof the person discussed in the article held a
specific opinion. Mueller's Note #45 claims to substantiate that, "Postel himself... admitted...it is unclear who actually controls
the name space." Yet the note is for Internet Architecture Board (IAB) minutes. Attributing it to Postel was a
fabrication.

Back-room, deal-making, conspiracy explanations are offered without substantiation. Of changes to Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF) management, Mueller states: "The most important reason the IETF didn't institute voting was that Jon Postel and
several other senior figures vowed that they would refuse to run for office." Postel never made such a vow, and the process to
effect these IETF changes did not experience any such attempts at influence. Of Postel's instructing some root servers to retrieve
copies of the DNS root from a non-NSI master, Mueller claims that Postel was "apparently concerned about the direction U.S. policy
was taking."

No substantiation is offered, because the claim is false. Postel and others were concerned about NSI's reaction to its own loss of
control. The switch was intended to see what it would take to move NSI out of the hierarchy. These are not small matters of nuance.
They show a pattern of misrepresentation.

The Author
Professor Mueller's credibility would have been aided by disclosing his own affiliations. The only ICANN constituency (the Non
Commercial Domain Name Holders Constituency) claiming to represent the noncommercial world focuses on the civil society concerns
that dominate the public debate about ICANN. Professor Mueller's discussion of the group is quite thin and does not disclose the
fact that he held a dominant management position in it. In his criticism of dispute-resolution activities, he neglects to mention
that he is a paid arbitration panelist.

An important book should be read because it has factual detail and thoughtful insight. Ruling the Root is, instead,
important because it so thoroughly embodies the difficulties that have emerged in discussing Internet policy. Because so many
people take Ruling the Root seriously, it should be read. However, the serious problems of the book encourage borrowing
it, rather than buying a copy. Based on the pattern noted in this review, a thorough audit of those problems would be appropriate
for the relevant Syracuse University academic ethics committee.

[3] Factual claims in the review that do not have citations are based on the reviewer's direct experience. Dave Crocker wrote the
first Internet standard for domain name syntax (RFC 822).
He also was the IETF area director for initial work on DNS security. More
recently he was one of Jon Postel's appointees to the IAHC. He naively thought that its work should be conducted in the manner that
had been typical for Internet administration. So the last few years of charged, global politicization have been an education. He
must also note that he was once Jon Postel's officemate.

This thoroughly updated classic covers topics of traffic engineering, queuing, and traffic modeling. The book gives a complete look
around the protocols of the next generation: Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP), Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), and Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP). It gives the keys to understand the way Frame Relay, TCP, and ATM react to
congestion and flow control. The book also deals with new trends and standards that will lead the telecommunications industry in
the following years. A very useful book, from the same author of traditional titles such as: Data Communications, Cryptography,
Computer Architecture, and many more.

OrganizationHigh-Speed Networks is divided into seven parts. The first one discusses the basic background needed to understand the
rest of the book. Following the introduction, the second chapter goes on with the classical: the Open System
Interconnection (OSI) model and the TCP/IP suite.

Part II explains packet-switching technologies in detail. The forth chapter explains the architecture of Frame Relay, and the next
one focuses on ATM, including its operation and the adaptation layers. Chapter 6 works on high speed LANs, covering Fast Ethernet
and Gigabit Ethernet, with the different media supported by each.

The third part is one of the most important; chapter 7 presents an overview of probability and stochastic processes. Although it is
a brief one, it is useful to make revision of some concepts. The next chapter works on queuing analysis, introducing the basic
elements of a queuing model. It explains the topics with plenty of examples: M/M/1, multiserver queues, and networks of queues,
presenting all the formulas. Chapter 9 is dedicated to self-similar traffic. As recent studies indicate, traffic on high speed
networks does not have the characteristics needed for the queuing theory. It introduces and explains the concept of self-similarity.
Then the author applies this concept to data traffic analysis and examines performance implications. Based on papers on this
subject, Stallings explains this new approach to traffic modeling not analyzed before.

The forth part focuses on another main topic: congestion and traffic management. Chapter 10 explains the effects of congestion and
the different ways to control and avoid it. In the following chapter the author discusses control mechanisms at the link level. He
examines different ways used by protocols to handle flow control: Stop and Wait, Sliding Window, and Go back N-ARQ. An analysis of
the performance gained by using Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) techniques follows.

These chapters give a detailed description of the different ways that communications can be handled. Chapter 12 focuses on
transport-level traffic management. It explains TCP flow control in detail, including the retransmission strategy. The way TCP
avoids congestion is discussed thoroughly. The next chapter continues with congestion control in ATM networks. The framework for
traffic control is explained in detail, with sections dedicated to Available-Bit-Rate (ABR) and Guaranteed-Frame-Rate (GFR) traffic management.

The next part of the book is about Internet routing. Chapter 14 presents the algorithms used to compute the minimum path, and
introduces some elementary concepts in graph theory. Later the author concentrates on Interior routing protocols, analyzing the Routing Information Protocol (RIP) and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), the most important ones. Next the book
discusses exterior routing protocols and multicast. The author describes in a simple way these addressing schemes and the related
protocols.

The following section is dedicated to Quality of Service (QoS) in IP networks. The first chapter discusses integrated
services, with coverage of queuing disciplines such as Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ). A review of the Differentiated
Services architecture follows.

After discussing the concepts, the author examines the protocols that support QoS: RSVP, MPLS, and RTP. He explains the philosophy
behind each protocol, its characteristics, and its implementation.

In the final part of the book, the author changes the subject to compression. In Chapter 19 he presents an overview of information
theory, discussing typical areas such as entropy. The next chapter continues with loss-less compression, facsimile compression, and
others. It discusses the Lempel-Ziv algorithm used in PKZIP. The final chapter reviews lossy compression, explaining the discrete
cosine transform, a key component of the Joint Photographics Expert Group (JPEG) and Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) standards.

Two very interesting appendices end the book: one for Internet standards and the standardization process and the other one
dedicated to sockets, containing source code. Although the book is not dedicated to programming, the inclusion of TCP sockets can
be useful to understand its implementation.

A book worth reading
We are facing an essential book for networking professionals, designers, and engineers. It covers unusual topics such as
self-similar traffic and data compression. It is the basement for the design of any high speed network. As Internet traffic
continues to grow, the optimization of network resources becomes a critical topic. Also, more and more voice traffic is carried
over packet networks, congestion being one of its worst enemies. The time-sensitive traffic needs attention, and this book provides
the tools to manage it.

In addition to its solid coverage of topics, the book has plenty of bibliography and many links to the principal sites for each
chapter. With no doubt this is a very useful book, from the well-known technical author William Stallings.

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